HORIZON TRÖM

2005 / Installation / Performance / Scenography

Performance installation (5 video installations, 3 sound installations, 1 installation interactive, 6 performers)

Multimedia rendering of our perception of death through dreams.

 

Walkthrough without comment

Horizon TröM is a multi-discipline, module-based project, which offers meditative pieces of art about dream and death. (In German, Traum means dream, if you read it backwards it means «Mort» – death in French.) The project focuses more specifically on what’s left of our death in our mind and life, and what is the space left for them by this society.  The purpose is not to emphasize a specific point of view but more to offer a meditative time and place.  Each module emphasizes different senses, melding into esthetical, intellectual or sensitive experiences. Modules can be shown alone or combined with others in an art exhibition, festival, or multi-media event. Or modules can be combined in a performance forum. 

Walkthrough with comment

“So in the end, what pleases the spectator and can it be repeated? Why leave the comfort of one’s home and what are we going to see? This was more or less the question I asked myself when entering the Petit Théâtre Mercelis to see Horizon TröM by Thomas Israël. Immediately I experienced a sense of relief: the spectator is not ‘taken hostage’ here by a pompous text or artificial stage business, but meanders dreamily through the scenographic installations, the visual and auditory stimulations. Horizon TröM is a show which ‘lets’ itself be seen, in the strongest sense of the term. We are therefore given all the time we need to feel at home. The absence of physical separation, the proximity of actors whispering text in your ear, suddenly make you want to become an actor yourself — by mysteriously approaching someone, for example, or crossing the stage, which has become an open space for the contemplation of other spectators. Fleeting encounters sometimes take place in the space of a glance, or in a complicit smile. Horizon TröM is a show about dreaming and death, during which people come to look at one another, among humans. We are ourselves, we are others and then we disappear in turn, just as we had appeared.”

- Cédric Juliens - Extract of ``Au théâtre le public n'applaudis pas les acteurs mais sa propre imagination``, in Scènes (n°14, juin 2005). -

LE LIT TROM

2005 / Installation / Interactive

Interactive video installation —Bed, screen, computer, video camera — 200 x 200 x 220 cm
Computer programming : Yacine Sebti
Metalwork : Alain Declercq.

Personal memento mori in dream form that summons up our perceptions of death.

The TröM Bed is a 3’35” sentient solitary experience.

The spectator lies on a baldachin bed,on the ceiling of which is projected a dream. The spectator is filmed, modified by a computer, and his image is projected into the dream, at specific moments, in real-time and actual size. This dream proposes one sensory slip through several death perceptions: the friendly cuddling death, the fearful seizing death, the decomposition/return to the ground death

 “I want to efface the distance between the body of the work, the body of the artist and the body of the spectator, who for me is wandering in the gap where these two other corporeal flows meet. My primal fantasy is to achieve total impregnation and fusion. The means to bring this about is in immersive, participative work: hence my three tall projections of Peeping Tom, the encapsulating Méta-crâne (Meta-Skull) and the TröM bed; hence Rivière noire (Black River) where my physical body becomes the work; hence also Percept, in which a full-size body is projected at very close range to the spectator. The poetic force that is released from certain works is the only means I know to evacuate what separates the physical from the mental, to attempt to bring together this body-mind reality.”

- Thomas Israel in Memento Body -

LADY DIE – POP CORN

2005 / Video

Video, 60’.

Critique of the showcase death as a substitute for intimate death.

CORPS EN TERRE

2005 / Video

Vidéo, 5’30”.

 Memento mori, video tableau.

BLANC HOPITAL

2005 / Video

Video loop: 2’35’’.

Hospital death viewed through a world of children’s toys.